Trade, labour and politics

THERE are a lot of things about the 2016 US presidential election that nobody saw coming, and one of them is that international trade policy is likely to be a major issue in the poll campaign. What's more, the positions of the parties will be the reverse of what you might have expected: Republicans, who claim to stand for free markets, are likely to nominate a crude protectionist, leaving Democrats, with their scepticism about untrammelled markets, as the de facto defenders of relatively open trade.

But this isn't as peculiar a development as it seems. Rhetorical claims aside, Republicans have long tended in practice to be more protectionist than Democrats. And there's a reason for that difference. It's true that globalisation puts downward pressure on the wages of many workers - but progressives can offer a variety of responses to that pressure, whereas on the right, protectionism is all they've got.

When I say that Republicans have been more protectionist than Democrats, I'm not talking about the distant past, about the high-tariff policies of the Gilded Age; I'm talking about modern Republican presidents, such as Ronald Reagan and George W Bush. Mr Reagan, after all, imposed an import quota on cars that ended up costing consumers billions of dollars. And Mr Bush imposed tariffs on steel that were in clear violation of international agreements, only to back down after the European Union (EU) threatened to impose retaliatory sanctions.